It starts off with a car crash, and enters its own pile-up before your eyes. There is some initial coherence, at least: Dylan, the son in a filthy rich family, played by Netflix star Noah Schnapp, has killed two people while drink-driving and injured several more. His parents, at their Hamptons home, are hashing out Dylan’s defence with a hotshot lawyer.
They deny he did anything wrong – “people died, he didn’t kill them” – and throw money at the problem in hope it goes away. All the while, 16-year-old Dylan plays Nintendo upstairs. An original legal defence is invoked, along the lines of the poor little rich boy, suffering from “affluenza”, a psychological malaise in which a crime becomes the fault of wealthy parents who have failed to teach their progeny right or wrong.
It is an intriguing setup with some parallels to the hit-and-run case involving teenager Harry Dunn and Anne Sacoolas. Its moral dilemma is promising, its echoes of victim culture resonant. So we are set to watch the court case play out in Andy Sandberg’s play but a minute later, it is reported to be over.
Under Sandberg’s direction, it screeches around a corner, on to the highway of the truly bizarre. The plot has moved on several decades after the interval. Dylan, now played by Rupert Young, who played the lawyer in the first half, is a middle-aged man and divorcee, while Schnapp now plays his 17-year-old son, Todd.
Dylan has repurposed his past for a reality TV show and what follows is a satire of the genre. A TV producer is choreographing the action, Todd doesn’t want any part of it, and a cameraman shooting the show has a breakout moment to lip-sync to Joan Osborne’s One of Us, apropos of nothing. Dry ice emanates from the wings.
Is this smoke rising from the play’s mangled car engine? Schnapp, star of hit show Stranger Things, faced some backlash for comments made soon after the 7 October Hamas attacks. The Israel-Palestine conflict is the least of his problems here.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
